The great Cambridge Analytica hoax

| 3:02 pm EDT March 28, 2018
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In the nearly year and a half since Donald Trump was named the winner of the 2016 presidential election, we’ve heard one story after another about how Trump won because his campaign’s data firm Cambridge Analytica had some kind of secret genius software model for determining precisely which voters to target. In the past ten days we’ve rapidly seen a very different story emerge. This latest revelation means it’s fair to declare Cambridge Analytica to have been one big hoax all along.

It turns out Cambridge Analytica didn’t even have a secret genius software model at its disposal. Whistleblower Christopher Wylie now says that the voter data analysis software being used by Cambridge Analytica actually came from some tiny company in Canada. In other words, Cambridge Analytica didn’t have any secret sauce when it came to its software modeling; it merely licensed some other obscure company’s software that apparently would have been available to anyone who wanted to license it.

All along we’ve been told that Cambridge Analytica had uniquely genius voter data modeling prowess up its sleeve, and now we know this was not the case. It explains a lot. In the week and a half since Facebook announced that Cambridge Analytica had stolen user data from fifty million Facebook users, and later reports had Cambridge Analytica embroiled in everything from bribery to blackmail to try to win elections, it increasingly appeared that the firm may have been forced to rely on these various forms of cheating because it wasn’t as good at voter data analysis as it claimed.

Now it’s instead fair to ask if Cambridge Analytica was created as a criminal election-fixing syndicate, and if the entire “genius voter data analysis” thing was merely a cover story so no one would catch on. After all, this was a company that officially existed solely due to its supposed super secret in-house voter data modeling software system, and now we know that was never the case. Cambridge Analytica is a hoax, and it appears to be a criminal hoax. What did Donald Trump know and when did he know it?